Froggy Breeze

'Froggy Breeze', originally titled 'Summer Breeze' is an adaptation meant to be a future level of Atlas Arena's 'Polar Winds'. I worked in a team of 5 to create it in the span of 2 and a half months. We each took on several roles, most people focusing on the design of the game. Since I had the most programming knowledge, I was made Lead Programmer.

Froggy? The frog version comes from me just having a bit of fun. I was experimenting with different checkpoint visuals, starting with shapes, and finding flowers worked quite well. After that, I had the idea that the players could be frogs and the empty spaces reminiscent of lily pads.

Challenges: The first challenge I faced was reading through and understanding the existing code database we were given. It was a lot, and having never touched TypeScript before, a little confusing. This took up a lot of my time, but by the end I was able to direct my teammates to specific points in the code that needed adjustment.

A feature I worked on in particular was the checkpoint (flower) logic. Players needed to collect them in a certain order but still be able to go back and reconnect ones without restarting if they accidentally passed checkpoint 4 before 3.

Since the collectibles were already in an array. I was able to filter them to find the checkpoints, which I had added a num property to. From there, I checked chaining, seeing if the previous number was collected (activated).

Geometry: To make the changed graphics, I needed to work a lot with 3D geometry. Creating shapes was relatively easy. Creating the flowers and frogs, not so much. Especially since the way they were imported did not allow for easy live-view as I edited the vertices.

I created a single page html document where I imported the shape I was working on through some javascript. This worked very well as a quick, optimized live view that I could then paste into our codebase after I had refined the shape to my liking.